To complement on the last post, I'm adding a little thingy I found myself. Maybe its an obvious nothing, but for me it was quite a blast when I realized it:
The brows/forehead and eye apperture (to a certain extent the action of the orbicularis oculi, the circular muscles around the eyes too) define an expression, and naturally, this expression moves very little over time. You hit an expression (as Shawn sais - 'work within an expression') and keep it, as a moving hold, for a long time. There are no major changes unless there is a good reason for that change. An expression can stay on someone's face from seconds to minutes... not rigid like a wall, but slowly changing over time (the moving hold is in need for careful planning just like normal, less subtle motion).
The emotion on the human face is expressed by the brows and eyes, and the mouth has very little to do with it. If your brows/eyes look sad, and you smile with your mouth, and then wipe off the smile, the expression won't change a bit, despite the wide facial movement. So I'd say... you can go crazy with the mouth movement, as long as the brows tension and eyelids aperture remain constant, the expression/emotion will be basically the same.
And it should! Cartoons, animation in general tends to overdo expression/emotion changes, and it looks theatrical. Disney's old men have discovered in the early days of animation that expression changes get the character to look like it's thinking. And of course they were right, the effect is very powerful. The problem is when you overdo it, and have a load of changes in a short span of time. One should exaggerate what's natural to be exagerrated, what naturally moves a lot: like the mouth ;) . And the animation will look more natural. If you have 2, 3 clearly defined emotion changes in each shot, you get a ton of emotional changes within a single minute of animation... That can easily look like a caleidoscope and make you dizzy, and then you get sick and die :D
Edit (April 2007):
Well, I think I've animated a quite stiff eyebrow line on my character Cousteau, I'm thinking now - subtle movement and fleshiness of the eyebrows area is important. People do exaggerate eyebrow movement often, and I don't quite like that, but keeping the eyebrows stiff isn't good either. Work within a pose, come back to it, go around it, move the eyebrows... but yeah, don't go from one expression to another without a reason, first of all, and not too often, anyway, unless there's a really good reason for it. It looks artificial to see animated characters changing their.. emotions, feelings, etc in a split second, and the next split second doing it again, and again...
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About me
I'm a character animator, visual artist, game dev, and music composer. I like to doodle, write, experiment, and plan my next big thing. I love tech that inspires and enables art. I have a formal background in music composition. And I like to walk around the world and see things up close. Archives
February 2022
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